Featured Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash Note: Every link in this post goes to the same place: WebAIM’s guide to accessible hyperlinks. I’m using this link as an example for demonstrating accessible and inaccessible linking styles. Let’s Talk About Links In Blog Posts There’s a particular style of linking common in blog posts that seems to date from the early days of the blog-o-sphere, in which bloggers embed a series of links in the body of their blogRead more

Building and maintaining healthy teams is real work that takes time and effort–especially if you’re trying to organize people to get something done. Doing that work within a flat or “leaderless” team can be rewarding–but the work of managing doesn’t disappear if you decide not to have managers.Read more

[CW: Rape, torture] This trope literalizes the notion that survivors of sexual violence aren’t necessarily people anymore. That if you’re deprived of agency over your body even briefly, you can permanently lose your humanity.Read more

I have a confession to make: When I first saw promo stills of Rose Tico, I was disappointed. Rose wasn’t the hero I wanted. She seemed too normal, too ordinary. I was so, so wrong. Rose might not have been the hero I thought I wanted, but she’s the hero we need.Read more

Telling people to “assume good intent” is a sign that if they come to you with a concern, you will minimize their feelings, police their reactions, and question their perceptions. It tells marginalized people that you don’t see codes of conduct as tools to address systemic discrimination, but as tools to manage personal conflicts without taking power differences into account.Read more

It is a truth universally acknowledged that as soon as a marginalized group develops words to describe their oppression, their oppressors will label those words ‘slurs.’Read more

Michi Trota: “Volunteers, Professionals, and Who Gets to Have Fun at Cons”Read more

I loved Black superheroines like Storm, Vixen, and Misty Knight as a kid – even though I never felt they were given the attention they deserved by mainstream media.Read more

Start a story with a farm boy and by the end, he’ll be a hero.

I grew up a geek girl on a dairy farm. My mother milked cows the day I was born. Thirty-three years later, I’m waking at 4:30 in the morning, tugging on my coveralls and muck boots, and heading out to a barn filled with fifty milk cows. Having descended from generations of rural Pennsylvania dairy farmers my agricultural roots are easy to pinpoint. My geek origins are more diffuse.Read more

From the porcelain doll to the kung fu master— two benevolent stereotypes which all Asian Americans have faced at one point or other. But both ideal femininity and ideal masculinity are carefully manufactured. No one can achieve these ideals, particularly not Mulan, however hard she tries.Read more

For the past couple of years, the demand for better representation has been pretty heated between those who have it and those who don’t. If you are white, male, straight, and cisgender, then you’re in the first group. If you’re not, then you’re tired of not seeing yourself and seeing bad representations of yourself in the media you enjoy. Yet, there are also some who have so little decent representation that they feel threatened by other groups who want the same.Read more

When you tell people that even acknowledging the existence of bisexuality renders a book ‘too mature’ for kids, you’re contributing to a hostile environment for bi and other queer kids. By treating their stories as dirty, you’re treating them as dirty. Read more

Three easy steps to begin to fix the problems with WFC. Mandatory codes of conduct and accessibility policies, improved communications, and incorporation of the parent organization.Read more

There are few things in life more fraught than talking about what makes us who we are in public–and even more so if those things are also sources of oppression or marginalization. Something that often compounds that vulnerability are tactics designed to shame or bully people into silence when they do speak out–even if they are only sharing our lived experience and not calling anyone out.Read more

When you’re interested in donating money to help improve conditions for women in tech, you need to be aware that clueless and unscrupulous people will take advantage of your good intentions to line their own pockets. Before you donate, assess projects with a critical eye. What is the project runner’s track record? What’s their angle? Who are they centering? Who’s getting paid?Read more

Misconceptions about disability and disabled people are still widespread–and the Science Fiction community is no exception. Science fiction and fantasy fans consume a steady diet of fiction that erases, marginalizes, and misrepresents disabled people and our experiences.Read more

So you’ve been called out. You are baffled. Shocked. Why would someone shame you in public like that? It isn’t fair! Why didn’t they talk to you privately?

Most likely, for one or more of the following reasons.Read more

I don’t think it’s much a secret that I love Twitter. But, recently, Twitter has also become a massive source of stress for me and I had to figure out some ways to manage it.
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Like nearly everyone else in my corner of the internet, Hamilton has completely gotten its hooks into me. A musical based on history where the women are as important to the plot as men? Where they have agency and make their own choices It shouldn’t be so revolutionary and yet: here we are!Read more

Companies that get called out for not taking into account how your products can harm marginalized people could do worse than to follow Chen’s example. He apologized, acknowledged the problem, committed to trying to fix it, and worked to get an opt-out solution out the door quickly.Read more

When you compare the plot summaries, N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season doesn’t seem to have much in common with Fran Wilde’s Updraft. But there are, in fact, thematic similarities between the two that I find incredibly interesting.Read more

A good diversity panel doesn’t try to tackle the entire ‘diversity issue’ in a single hour. Instead, choose a more focused topic that will give panelists a chance to share their perspective and experience while grounding the discussion in something concrete, so it’s accessible to an audience that hasn’t necessarily done all their homework.Read more

I am a woman in tech. At least I might be one. Maybe. I don’t have a technical degree. I don’t work in IT or at a company on the bleeding edge of technology. The code I write isn’t written in Python or Ruby, but rather Excel and VBA and SQL.Read more

[Content Warning: harassment, assault, bad event safety handling]

It’s important for community leaders to understand that enforcing standards of conduct is not about resolving a conflict between an abuser and their victim. It’s about protecting the community from abuse.Read more